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Tuesday, 01 September 2009 |
In a recent presentation by a competitor I was once again amazed and astounded as to how little their marketing department actually researches prior to making sweeping statements to the public. Then again, I should probably not be amazed as this particular company considers a fair test to be one they paid over US$100k to send one of their own engineers to test and finely tune their product against CommVault out of the box with no training.
Then again, it is possibly the only way that this company know how to get a good review and spread the FUD when in panic mode about their competitors (that would be us), which seems to be all the time in recent years.
Without naming any competitors in particular, as this is not our philosophy, I would like to set the record straight, or at least make some corrections to misleading statements.
The following points were made against CommVault in this competitors latest product launch presentation. The statements are in Red, and our clarification is in Green: -
• Competitors Statement: Do not deduplicate at the client. Server only...
• Response: CommVault provides a comprehensive deduplication that includes the ability to turn hashing (block comparisons) on or off at the client side to ensure the best mix of performance of both the host and the deduplication function. In addition to deduplication in data centres, CommVault introduced in version 7 and enhanced in version 8 the ability to provide remote site deduplication and the replication of deduplicated, compressed, and encrypted data across both LAN and WAN topologies to provide centralised deduplicated data storage. The replication technology is known as DDR, or Discrete Data Replication, something CommVault has offered since 2007.
• Competitors Statement: Does not support deduplication integration with other 3rd parties (OST or Open Source Technologies)
• Response: CommVault has worked with numerous 3rd party deduplication partners such as Data Domain for over 2 years since the release of Single Instance Storage in July 2007 and continue to do so. Then again, there is not much OST provided by any of the third party proprietary deduplication players anyway. Calling something Open Source is usually just another way of pointing the finger when it all goes to s...
• Competitors Statement: Do not deduplicate Virtual Images
• Response: CommVault has included full block level deduplication of virtual images since the release of Simpana version 8 some 6 months ago and have many existing customers willing to testify to this. Not a marketing team.
• Competitors Statement: Can only recover data from an Exchange DB backup with RSG and that we have no granular recovery technology (GRT)
• Response: CommVault introduced with Simpana 8 a Data Mining tool which can not only provide granular recover from a single pass Exchange Datastore backup, but can also provide the same granular recover for SharePoint and Active Directory.
It is also interesting to note that CommVault Simpana does not require a separate server and a totally stand-alone solution to provide GRT. Granular recovery technology or data mining is simply a Simpana module and does not require additional management or hardware.
• Competitors Statement: Both CommVault and another competitive product were compared and found to be massively slower that this vendors product
• Response: While the result is impressive, there are no comparisons of what exactly was backed up or restored. I would suggest that re results do not indicate a comparison against the same data. Easy to win a shoot out if your target data is much smaller than your competitors and you do not need to substantiate it, just brag about how good you are.
• Competitors Statement: CommVault cannot do a file/folder level restore from a VM backup
• Response: CommVault perform a full index of all VM backups prior to moving the data to disk or tape storage. This capability allows Simpana to perform very fast recovery of full VM images (VMDK’s) as well as individual file and folder recovery.
• Competitors Statement: CommVault cannot do incremental or differential backups of VM’s
• Response: Not only does Simpana provide full, incremental or differential backup capabilities for VM machines and images, Simpana offers the ability to provide Synthetic backups where limited bandwidth or time are of the essence.
• Competitors Statement: CommVault nor the competitor provide P2V capabilities
Response: The Simpana 1-Touch module has been utilised for for a number of years by many of our clients to perform P2V and V2P within their virtual environments. (Nice to see they admit at least one weakness).
I am sure our own internal marketing and product teams will come up with a more comprehensive and appropriate statement than the above but it gets a perspective out there on our view.
credit S Hall
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